Search Engine Optimization Revisited
Over the last few months I have learned a lot more about search engine optimization. I will try to cover everything in this post. I hope this article benefits your understanding and knowledge of search engine optimization.
Keywords
The keywords you chose for your website could be the difference between getting lots of traffic and getting low to none traffic. One of the best ways to find which keywords you should be uses is to study your competitors’ meta keywords and find which ones are getting the most daily searches. You want to rank #1 for these keywords on the search engines. It is also very good to have your domain as your main keyword. Use your keywords in header tags.
Content
Perhaps you have heard this before and I am sure that you have, but content is king. Fresh new daily content with your keywords in it will please the search engines, this is why blogs do well because people tend to post often. Content can especially be good if it is high quality info that people like and start to spread it viral. High quality content will also get people to bookmark your website so that they can return later.
Your keyword density will also pay a big role on your search engine rankings. Make sure your content has your keywords in them multiple times but not so much that it is not readable or looks like spam.
Never copy content from any other website. Google and other search engines punish websites that copy content. It is worth writing your own unique content. Never be lazy about the content of your website. If you are having trouble writing content for your website you can outsource and pay a freelancer to write you some articles.
Page Title
Your page title should include your main keyword twice or your top two keywords once each. It is also very important that each and every one of your pages have a unique title. Here is an example below of what would be good page names for a website about “Search Engine Optimization”:
- Home Page: “Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Google, Yahoo, Alexa”
- About Page: “About Us | Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Google, Yahoo, Alexa”
- Article: “Article Title | Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Google, Yahoo, Alexa”
You get the idea.
Back-links
Back-links back-links back-links back-links. Back-links are definitely the most importing factor in search engine rankings. The more quality back-links you have, the higher you are ranked. The best back-links you can get are from your competitors, but it is very unlikely that you will get them. A back-link is basically a recommendation. Back-links will also get your website indexed on search engines faster if it is not indexed already.
It is really important for your back-links to include your keywords in them. This will tell the search engines that your website is related to the keyword. If you want to rank well for “Search Engine Optimization” then it would be very beneficial to have back-links with that anchor text.
Link exchanges and link farms are not good ways to get back-links and I highly recommend that you stay away from them.
Writing articles and submitting them to article directories like “www.squidoo.com” are great ways to get free high quality back-links. The downside about writing and submitting articles is that it is time consuming, though luckily this can be easily outsourced. There are many outsourcing and freelancing companies and individuals that will do these kinds of things.
Blog comments are another good way to get back-links, although it can be difficult to find blogs that have do-follow comments. There are many do-follow blog directories such as “www.dofollowblogs.com” that you can quickly find several blogs to post comments on. Keep in mind that you will need to post quality comments or they will be deleted.
Spy on your competitions’ keywords and keep an eye on what websites they have back-links on. This way you could possibly find good places to get back-links for your websites.
All of your pages should have a link to your main page and all of your other pages so that the search engines have no problem finding all of your pages.
Web directory submission is also a good way to get back-links to your website. Submit your website to about 10 new web directories every day or two. Getting listed on www.dmoz.org is quite difficult and your website has to be unique but it pays off well. Make sure your anchor text includes your main keyword phrase.
Submit your website to social networking sites such as digg, reddit, and technorati. This is a good way to get free back-links and will even get you some traffic.
You can use google analytics and google webmaster tools to track your keywords, back-links, and traffic. You should also submit a site-map to google webmaster tools.
SEO URLs
If you are using a dynamic language such as PHP to code your website in then it would be good to rewrite your URLs using htaccess to appear as static HTML pages.
Your file names should be a keyword of what the page is about, for example a page about SEO could be “http://www.example.com/search-engine-optimization.html”. It is better to use dashes instead of underscores.
Tools
There are many tools out there on the internet that you can use to view SEO related data about your website. Here I have created a list about the websites I frequent most.
- SEOChat.com - Many SEO tools
- DNScoop.com - Great for tracking your back-links and PageRank, and also good for spying on competitors.
- Whois.sc - Check your whois data. I like this site because it gives you a little SEO score and has a little browser that gives you some good SEO tips and info about your website.
That is all I can think of right now, I hope you enjoyed this post. Thanks for reading.